by Roy Keene
Appeared in Register-Guard: Saturday, Aug. 21, 2010, page A8
Reprinted with permission from the author
The debate over Bureau of Land Management timber sales and the revenue they provide to Oregon’s timber counties has been restricted to harvest age and volume.
Increasing harvest value to the counties would produce more revenue without harvesting more volume. Receiving substantially more timber value from less volume also would help resolve contentious forest issues and sustain our forest.
Those of us who market private timber realize that public timber usually is sold for far less than real market value. That is why industry puts constant pressure on BLM sales. It purchases our timber for a fraction of true value.
An obvious way to increase the worth of our timber is to log when timber prices are up, not down. In 2008, a very soft market, the BLM logged three times more timber than it did in 2001, when log prices were twice as high. In contrast, nonindustrial private forest owners held back in 2008, logging only a third the volume they did in 2005 when prices surged. Of course, private forest owners aren’t politically forced to sell timber in down markets.
The BLM’s imprudent market timing violates a rarely quoted tenet of the O&C Act. This legislation directs how public forestlands — given for the former Oregon & California railroad that never was built, partially plundered, then re-conveyed to the public — are to be managed. This tenet says to sell “so much (timber) thereof as can be sold at reasonable prices on a normal market.” If public timber is being logged in abnormally low markets simply to supply local lumber producers, perhaps industry officials should re-direct their log exports toward domestic mills.
Experienced private forest owners rarely let an operator purchase the harvest rights to their timber, invade their forest to cut, sort and re-sell their timber, then leave a mess. Instead, the owners collect purchase orders for various timber species and grades and hire their own loggers to carefully cut, sort and deliver their timber to the most competitive purchasers. By contrast, the BLM sells huge chunks of mixed timber to big timber corporations, which typically hire the cheapest logging, sort out our highest value logs for windfall profits and often leave our woods heaped with debris.
Another timber cruiser and myself reviewed the BLM Cogswell Creek sale just east of Eugene. This so-called “thinning” clearly is being logged hard to produce volume and loads of slash, not improve the stands. It sold for only $38 per thousand board feet. The sale included dense, healthy stands of tall, pole straight, tight-grained, 65-plus-year-old Douglas fir that can be resold for $600 per thousand board feet even in today’s soft market. At 6 million board feet, only a few large companies can afford to purchase these big sales, raising questions of price fixing and insuring greater corporate profits.
The log scaling and grading system currently used to value and sell timber was created 100 years ago, when forests still were full of lumber-perfect trees. Controlled by industry, this system always has been biased in their favor. It’s archaic grading rules allow timber operators to buy our old growth timber as “culls” for chip wood prices. Scaling rules allow a modern mill to cut two board feet from every board foot they pay us for. If we are to receive fair value for our timber, BLM will need to exercise far more control over logging and marketing.
The timber industry continues to pressure our management agencies to sell more timber in today’s soft market. It’s not because they’ve run out of their own trees. They push for more public logging because they make huge profits from the subsidy-laden manner in which our timber is sold.
To help sustain, even increase timber revenues, commissioners in timber counties should work toward reforming the BLM’s injudicious logging practices. Receiving fair market value for our timber could increase county revenues significantly without increasing harvest volume.
Selling half our timber at twice the price would be a win for forests and people.
Roy Keene is a timber cruiser and a private forest broker in Eugene
[photo courtesy Roy Keene]
